Margiad Evans was the pseudonym of Peggy Eileen Whistler (1909-1958), a poet, novelist and illustrator with a lifelong identification with the Welsh border country. Evans wrote ground-breaking depictions of love, sex, illness and death in the lives and work of women inhabiting harsh and restrictive rural environments. Her writing ranges from the balanced symmetries of her debut novel Country Dance, to Creed with its ’postmodern’ authorial interventions and anticipation of structuralism, through to the meditations on creativity and divinity contained in the Autobiography. Her beloved south Herefordshire/Wales borderland to which she moved on her marriage was inspirational in itself. And, as her health deteriorated, so death, and its unquiet acceptance, became central to her work.

An experiment in what Evans called ‘earth writing,’ Autobiography covers a period of only a few years of her life toward the end of World War II, but in doing so offers a vivid insight not only of her own connectedness to the natural world but a profound portrait of a writer’s life.